1915 war census poster.
Ref: Eph-D-WAR-WI-1915-01. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand.

Men who refused to fight risked being accused of cowardice even when they undertook other kinds of war service. This cartoon shows a young woman confronting her beau after learning he has volunteered for non-combatant service. The cartoonist clearly sympathises with her, depicting the man as shifty, effete and slump-shouldered.
Observer, 29 January 1916, p.17.

'... my oath to serve my King and my duty to God are in conflict. Technically at least this is treason and therefore I desire to submit myself to the judgment of the military authorities.'

Vivian Ramsay declares his conscientious objection to the authorities at Featherston Military Camp, May 1916. Military personnel file, R7880700, Archives New Zealand, Wellington.

A matter of conscience

Vivian Ramsay was in Featherston Military Camp preparing to go overseas with the 14th Reinforcements in May 1916 when he had his dark night of the soul. He was, on the face of it, an unlikely conscientious objector. Before the war he had been an officer in the territorials, training the Hamilton Boys High School Cadets as an adjunct to his work as a master at the school. He had not gone into camp earlier because rheumatic fever had left him with a weak heart and he had spent large portions of 1915 sick and unfit for military service. He had some qualms about whether Christians could justify their participation in the war but in January 1916 he quietened his doubts and reported for duty.6  Four months later he reported that his faith presented an insuperable obstacle to going to war.  `Sir’, he informed the Assistant Infantry Instructor, ‘my oath to serve my King and my duty to God are in conflict. Technically at least this is treason and therefore I desire to submit myself to the judgment of the military authorities.’7

In late 1915 and early 1916 as Ramsay wrestled with his conscience, a political battle was raging over whether New Zealand would introduce conscription. During 1915, districts fell short of their recruitment quotas, and in October 1915 the government instituted a National Registration programme to gather details about every man aged between 17 and 60. The object was to assess how many men were available for service with the New Zealand Expeditionary Force. Of the 208,513 men who submitted their details, 109,683 stated their willingness to serve with the NZEF. A further 43,524 were willing to serve in a civil capacity only, while 34,386 declared themselves unwilling to serve in any capacity.8 This evidence that voluntary recruitment would have its limits alarmed authorities and added impetus to the call for conscription. Britain introduced conscription early in 1916, and by mid-1916 a Military Service Bill was before the New Zealand parliament. On 16 November 1916 the first conscription ballot was drawn.

The pressure on all men of military age was immense; for those in families with no sons on active service it was particularly acute. As Ramsay’s hometown newspaper recollected: ‘There was an impression throughout the country that the sons of certain families were evading their responsibilities, and in some cases the wildest statements had been made by people who knew only that certain men looked fit and were not in camp.’9 After the Military Service Act (1916) came into operation, the Defence Department was inundated with the names of men alleged to be ‘family shirkers’. Poignant stories were told of families with five or six sons in uniform, and elderly parents whose only sons had gone to war.10 When Military Service Boards began hearing applications for exemption from conscription, they were required to exempt the last remaining brother in families in which one or more brothers had died; conversely it was part of their job to see that ‘family shirkers’ did not evade their obligations. Concerned citizens sat in judgment on their neighbours’ sons.  As one columnist railed, ‘shirker families should be rounded up and made to do their share before others were called on ….’’11

Ramsay was a volunteer, not a conscript. Still, the threat of being labelled a ‘shirker’ hung over him as he struggled to reconcile his faith with his military obligations and the vulgarities of army culture. His qualms resurfaced just before his transfer to Featherston as a platoon officer: ‘I chanced to have lent me a book written by a man whom I had great cause to respect, in which Christian men were challenged to base their attitude in this crisis upon the actual teaching of Jesus Christ.’ Ramsay does not name the book or its author, but its effect was profound. He tried reading it combatively, looking for counterarguments to its pacifist message, and studying what he called ‘the national (and normal) Christian attitude’ to war. It was no good, ‘all I have read and thought has only strengthened the conviction that as a Christian I cannot fight take any part.’ While stressing that he was ‘respectfully’ resigning his commission, he reproached the army for the profanities of his fellow soldiers. Military service coarsened men: ‘the veneer of life is off and men show their true selves.’  ‘How’, he asked, can godless soldiers ‘fight in His spirit or purge themselves of the spirit of hate?’12 He left the nation's service ‘the better [to] serve mankind.’13

This was an agonising decision to make. In declaring himself a conscientious objector Vivian Ramsay was risking financial security and respectability. Between early 1917 and November 1918, 286 New Zealand conscientious objectors were sent to prison. Many were, like Ramsay, members of mainstream Christian denominations who believed the word of Christ prohibited them from participating in the war.14 He was also aware that his loyalty would be questioned and took pains to paint a picture of himself as a patriot:  `I come from worthy stock, of Scotland and of Devon. I have been brought up to consider patriotism the very breath of life. I have drunk of the spirit of Kingsley and of Burns, of Tennyson and of Scott. I have loved England well, and love her still. In the present struggle I know surely that if national causes be compared that of England is right and that of Germany damnably wrong.’ Yet, love of country could not quell his doubts about the war’s moral justification. England's hands were not clean: ‘She is in no true sense a Christian nation; her real reliance at this moment is not in God but in material forces - in armaments and in men.’15